On the Problem of Textuality and Intertextuality in Ivan Mosjoukine’s Film Le Brasier ardent (1923)

Based on modern methods of studying the phenomenon of cinema as a text, this article considers Le Brasier ardent, directed by Ivan Mosjoukine, in terms of complex intertextual whole, which arose at the junction of varying cinematic traditions, but which also intersects with European visual culture. Taking into account Mosjoukine’s aesthetics, principally articulated in interviews with Jean Mitry, the goals, motives and algorithms of his cinematic experiment are revealed. They were created in an implicit dialogue with David Wark Griffith and are an attempt to search for Mosjoukine’s own concept of a purely visual language — a correlate of a verbal communicative and semantic-generating system. The symbolisation of the shot and its transformation into a self-value sign, requiring the activation of the viewer’s cultural memory and interpretation mechanisms derived from it, is based on the principle of stylistic and genre allusion (German expressionism and French avant-garde), as well as visual quotation; an example of this being the analysis of the correspondence between the image of the main heroine’s awakening, iconic for both narrative and metaphorical dimensions of the film, and Henry Fusely’s Nightmare. The textuality of Le Brasier ardent stems from the innovative ideas of Yakov Protazanov, the director who worked with Mosjoukine in the seminal film The Queen of Spades, which relates to the internal structure of the shot and types of editing as methods of organising different images into an analog of a speech act

Allusion · Intertextuality · Metonymy · Movie theater · Narrative · Textuality · Cinema and Media Studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies